Mitch McConnell’s Master Plan Goes Up in Smoke

Within hours of House Republicans narrowly passing their bill to repeal Obamacare last month, Mitch McConnell assured wary members of his caucus that the Senate wouldn’t vote on the unpopular and deeply flawed American Health Care Act. Instead, McConnell, an L.B.J.-esque master of the dark arts of the upper chamber, suggested that the Senate would draft its own, more generous health-care bill. Soon thereafter, McConnell and Senate Republicans absconded into a series of clandestine sessions in the hopes of producing a bill that might also narrowly squeak through, with a little grease and strong-arming.

Now, five days after McConnell unveiled the crudely-named Better Care Reconciliation Act, the effort to hold a quick vote on the legislation has stalled, imperiling what Republican leadership hoped would be an expedited process. On Tuesday, the Senate majority leader announced that he will delay the vote until after the July Fourth recess, in order to revise the legislation, get a new score from the Congressional Budget Office, and whip more support for the bill.

“We are going to continue the discussions within our conference on the differences that we have, that we are continuing trying to litigate,” McConnell said during a brief press conference on Tuesday. He added, “Legislation of this complexity almost always takes longer than anybody would hope but we are going to press on.”

The unexpected delay comes one day after the C.B.O. reported that McConnell’s bill, which was already facing a minor revolt from a handful of wary Republicans, would result in a massive increase in the number of Americans without health insurance. Conservatives blanched at the federal scorekeeper’s estimate that premiums and deductibles would rise, while moderates expressed alarm that 15 million people would lose insurance in the 2018 alone, relative to current law, with that number ballooning to 22 million by 2026.

McConnell’s political calculus always assumed a tight vote: with Vice President Mike Pence on hand to break a tie, he can only afford to lose two of the 52 Republican senators to secure passage. The number of holdouts on Tuesday, when news broke that McConnell would delay the vote, was several times that. Fellow Kentuckian Rand Paul was among the first to suggest last week that he would not support the bill on grounds that it was too much like Obamacare—an argument that was quickly echoed by Senators Ted Cruz,Mike Lee, and Ron Johnson. “I’ve been very upfront with leadership for some time: Don’t jam us, don’t jam the American public,” Johnson said after the C.B.O. score was released, hinting that he might oppose a procedural vote to even bring the bill to the floor. “I have a hard time believing I’m going to have the information to vote for a motion to proceed.” Paul told reporters, “It’s worse to pass a bad bill than no bill.” The moderate faction, which includes Susan Collins and Dean Heller, also said they might block a procedural vote, with Collins signaling that she’d prefer to start over on health-care and would be open to working with Democrats.

Other Republicans had argued that the bill should at least make it to the floor for debate. “I would hope . . . our members would at least let us get on it,” Senator John Thune of South Dakota told Politico. “Everybody wants to exert whatever leverage that they can, where they can get the most leverage, but I would expect we’d be able to get on the bill.”

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McConnell is not, however, out of hands to play. While the House health-care bill would only cut $119 billion from the federal deficit over the next decade, the C.B.O. estimates that the Senate version, as currently written, will reduce it by $321 billion over the same period. This means that McConnell has about $200 billion in cushion to make compromises with individual senators to win over their votes. According to Politico, a group of senators from states that expanded Medicaid under the A.C.A. met on Monday to discuss getting the Kentucky senator to pour more funding into the program and allocate funds to address the opioid crisis ravaging middle American. One way forward for McConnell could be finding ways to appease moderates worried about the steep coverage losses, without losing the votes of conservatives and deficit hawks. Another could be kowtowing to the quartet of conservative holdouts, pushing the bill further to the right, so long as he only loses Collins and Heller.

In the meantime, Trump plans to do some arm twisting of his own. The president invited all Senate Republicans to the White House on Tuesday afternoon to discuss the future of the health-care bill, Politico reports. But even without pressure from the president, Republican leadership appears driven to find a way forward. McConnell is a shrewd legislator who likely knows that extending the debate around health care is likely to hurt his party and dampen the chances of passing a tax-reform plan later in the year. The current plan, one G.O.P. aide told Axios, is to “Work over the next 72 hrs to come to an agreement. Vote after the break.” Another aide told CNN, “We know what everyone needs. Now we just need to make it work.”

Amid the chaos on Capitol Hill, some have speculated that McConnell may be playing some three-dimensional chess, going through the motions of holding a vote even as he knows that the divisions within his caucus are too deep for any bill to pass. Several Republican operatives toldThe Washington Post that a failed vote on the B.C.R.A. might not be a tragedy for the party, “since no one loves the bill, and moderates could avoid being burdened by it.” Others have suggested that giving Senate more time to debate won’t result in a more popular bill among the G.O.P. rank and file, but rather amplify existing intra-party tensions. “If you were on the fence, you were looking at this as a political vote, this C.B.O. score didn’t help you,” Lindsey GrahamtoldThe New York Times on Monday. “So I think it’s going to be harder to get to 50, not easier. The South Carolina senator added, “I don’t know, if you delayed it for six weeks, if anything changes.” Thune echoed the sentiment, argueing earlier that pushing a vote made sense “if you thought you were going to get a better policy,” but that “this is the best we can do to try and satisfy all the different perspectives in our conference.” It’s time, he added, “to fish or cut bait.”

Trump, for his part, has floated a backup plan if the votes don’t work out for the White House: let Obamacare “crash & burn.”